Sixteen years ago, I entered the doors of the US Department of Transportation as a programmer assigned to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. I was so excited– I was new to the city of Washington, DC and slinging code just two blocks from the National Air and Space Museum– geek heaven!

Since that introduction to the Federal Government, I’ve worked as a contractor for other agencies including the EPA, the Department of Defense, HHS, and the NIH. In 2006 I became the Web Manager for the Executive Office of the President, charged with keeping the lights on (and shining brightly!) for the WhiteHouse.gov website. In the summer of 2008, we realized that our home-grown WebCMS, with some code rumored to have been around since the end of the Clinton Administration, wasn’t going to cut it for the next Administration, no matter who won the election. It was then that began WhiteHouse.gov’s journey from a hand-jammed, statically-published website to a fully-managed web services platform, ultimately driven by the open-source WebCMS solution, Drupal.

On Monday, January 11, I’ll be returning to the Department of Transportation Headquarters to attend the Open Government Directive Workshop Series and participate in a session with Acquia, the commercial entity behind Drupal, to discuss how Drupal is, and can be, a valuable tool to support the efforts of the
Open Government Directive
.

For the session I’ll be briefly sharing our WhiteHouse.gov road trip to Drupal– why we chose it, how it’s implemented, and how Drupal supports the Open Government Directive call for collaboration.

The event begins at 9:00am and if you’re planning on attending, then look me up! If you haven’t registered, most of the tickets have been claimed, however there are plenty of free Live Webcast tickets available for registration at the Open Government Workshop’s
EventBrite page
.

See you there!